The Haiti model.

So Bill Clinton has had his little military expedition in our hemisphere, evidently a required trip for every President. And just like previous U.S. interventions in the region, the occupation of Haiti - despite the pious rhetoric - is not about "restoring democracy," as if democracy could ever be restored by outside military force. No, this occupation is about subverting democracy in Haiti, and unfortunately it is already succeeding all too well.

The Jean-Bertrand Aristide who returned as president of Haiti on October 15, 1994, is not the same Jean-Bertrand Aristide who was elected president on December 16,1990. The old Aristide came to power as the representative of a grass-roots, mass-based movement of the Haitian people - calling itself the lavalas or flood. This movement was aimed at addressing the fundamental problems of Haiti's society: a gross inequity in wealth, a repressive military structure, and an abject subservience to U.S. commercial interests.

The new Aristide has been forced to kiss the ring of the U.S. empire and has now sacrificed the basic goals of the lavalas movement.

Aristide's economic capitulation began even before he set foot back in his homeland. In August, Aristide sent his financial advisers to Paris and Madrid to cut a deal with the World Bank and other Western lenders. In exchange for $770 million in aid, Aristide agreed to decimate the public sector, deprive the populace of much-needed subsidies, and throw open the country to foreign investors, as Allan Nairn reported in Multinational Monitor.

One of Aristide's chief campaign promises in 1990 was to double the minimum wage for Haitian workers, which stands at a paltry $2 a day. You don't hear him talking about this any longer. "It's not on the agenda," Axel Peuker, a World Bank specialist on Haiti, told Nairn.

As soon as he had safely landed in Haiti, Aristide sounded the economic retreat. At the level of personnel, he began to appoint wealthy, pro-Western advisers to his cabinet. For prime minister, Aristide bowed to U.S. wishes and chose Smarck Michel, described as "an American-educated commodities trader" by The New York Times. "Mr. Michel's pragmatic, pro-market stance and his role as a successful businessman make him a generally palatable choice for the United States and international organizations and a reasonable selection for Haiti's elite, most political experts here agree," The Times reported.

At the level of policy, Aristide wasted no time before taking actions that ran exactly counter to the lavalas vision. For instance, within four days of resuming the presidency, Aristide did away with the subsidy on fuel, doubling its price overnight. Aristide's Commerce Minister, Louis Dejoie, tellingly pointed out that this decision was not his - or Aristide's - to make.

"Someone just gave me a piece of paper and said, `This is the price.' Everything was agreed on in Paris and Madrid," said Dejoie. "I had nothing to do with it."

So much for economic democracy.

Aristide has fared no better in getting hold of Haiti's brutal security forces. The United States has strong-armed Aristide into maintaining the very military structure that terrorized Haiti for so long. Once the three junta leaders left the country, the Clinton Administration acted as though all was hunkydory. It convinced Aristide not to dismantle the dreaded military and police, but instead to allow the U.S. military to "retrain" the security forces - an irony, since the security forces were trained by the United States in the first place. As many as 3,000 members of the old Haitian police force are being "retrained."

Not every Haitian official is pleased with this outcome. "I am unsettled by the proposal to integrate elements of the army into the new police," Evans Paul, Mayor of Port-au-Prince said. "The Haitian army has had only one function: to control the people."

The worst violators of human rights have gotten off scot-free. Emmanuel Constant, the head of the terror organization FRAPH, which was responsible for the murder of hundreds of Haitians, is still plying his trade in Haiti. No wonder: Constant has been on the CIA payroll.

Our old friend Allan Nairn, this time reporting in The Nation, revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency helped Constant set up FRAPH to "balance the Aristide movement." (Another historical note: Constant told Nairn that the CIA station chief and the DIA station chief were inside the headquarters of the coup leaders when Aristide was overthrown.)

Constant has not been arrested; indeed, he has been protected by the U.S. embassy, supplied with a public platform, and repackaged as a peaceful opposition figure, even as the killings go on.

Many liberals and some leftists in the United States have supported the U.S. occupation of Haiti. Their support is ill-conceived and naive. They claim that since the United States created the mess in Haiti, it is our responsibility to clean it up. But who are "we"?

Let's be clear: The U.S. Government is not in Haiti to clean up its mess; it is there to keep messing the place up.

If President Clinton wanted to come clean on Haiti, why did he allow the CIA to disseminate scurrilous lies about Aristide? Why did he allow the CIA to keep paying Constant? Why did he have Secretary of State Warren Christopher and CIA Director R. James Woolsey lie about the U.S. ties to Constant? And why is he protecting Constant now? Certainly Clinton cannot be praised for his humanitarianism in this "rescue" mission. If Clinton had wanted to do the right thing in Haiti, why did he wait two years to do it, at the cost of several thousand lives? Why did he pursue an inhumane refugee policy, which caused hundreds more Haitians to lose their lives?

The answer is simple: Clinton doesn't care about democracy or human rights in Haiti. He cares about maintaining U.S. hegemony there, and his own popularity here.

He knew that a military venture would give him an uptick in the polls within a month of the off-year elections. And he was aware that the Haitian refugee crisis was causing political trouble at home, so the occupation had clear political purposes (David Gergen, take a bow).

But he also decided to send in the troops because it was becoming obvious that the military junta could not sustain itself indefinitely; its repressive tactics were too gross and too public. It had to be replaced, and the only way to do so short of starting a civil war was to bring Aristide back - but not the Aristide of 1990, that was unacceptable to America's imperial interests. Clinton had to put Aristide through the wash-and-dry cycle several times before Aristide would shrink to a safe and suitable size.

It was the perfect script. Undermine the democratic reform movement with the person who used to lead that movement, and claim triumphal credit for restoring democracy in the process. This is the Haiti model. It is already being written up in the newest primers at the Pentagon and Langley.

The Nuclear Fix

Some habits are just too hard to break, and for the U.S. Government, the nuclear habit is the hardest of all.

In late October, the Department of Energy announced a $1.8 billion plan to modernize U.S. nuclear war-making capabilities. The project centers around the building of a new laser machine at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to "generate miniature blasts of thermonuclear fusion" and to maintain "the reliability of hydrogen bombs."

This is a high-tech way to get around the moratorium on testing nuclear weapons, which Clinton - to his credit - so far has upheld. The new project, the National Ignition Facility, is designed to enable the Department of Energy, in essence, to test the weapons without having massive underground explosions. "This answers the question of maintaining our core competence," Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary announced.

But maintaining nuclear "competence" is not what the moratorium is all about. The reason why a test ban is so important is because it makes the nuclear powers uncertain about their weapons, and thus less likely to use them. This new facility would undermine the whole basis of the moratorium. Plus, it could accelerate the nuclear arms race because other nations will understand that the United States is not serious about the moratorium and will therefore strive to catch up. Even the facility itself might act as an engine of the arms race because it "would create a cadre of experts that in theory could design new bombs if needed," The New York Times reported.

We don't need new nuclear bombs. We don't need a new cadre of nuclear experts. We need disarmament, and we need it now.

A Nation of Inmates

The United States set a new record in the race to get tough on crime-one million Americans are now in prison, and our country has the second-highest per-capital rate of incarceration in the world (Russia is still ahead of us). The prison population has more than doubled in the last decade, thanks in part to popular "three-strikes" legislation and stricter sentencing guidelines for drug offenders.

The political rhetoric during the recent elections demonstrates that there is no end in sight. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives competed desperately to be the "toughest" and "hardest" on criminals.

Keeping so many Americans behind bars makes it hard for state governments to afford much else. As the prisons grow, the resources available for the public schools and other social services continue to shrink. The Federal Government, under President Clinton's recently passed crime bill, will offer some assistance to states-provided they use most of it to build even more prisons. Of course, filling up the new cell blocks will, in the long run, drive states even deeper into debt.

Punishment has become our nation's main preoccupation, yet there's still no shortage of crime. As a society, we have decided to invest our money and energy in locking people up, rather than addressing the poverty, injustice, and rage that create crime in the first place. For lack of a better social vision, we are bankrupting ourselves, creating a nation of inmates.

At what point do we stop and say, enough?